Increasing popularity of DeFi induces me to review and rate one of the most visible decentralized lending platforms — ETHLend.io (“Democratizing Lending” White Paper as of 25 February 2018) on “Vision”: Singularity- Volume-Empathy-Timeline.
Citing: “ETHLend is a fully decentralized financial marketplace built on top of the Ethereum Network allowing lenders and borrowers from all over the world to create peer to peer lending agreements in a secure and transparent way using Blockchain and Smart Contracts.”
I do not think that after two years of DeFi’s rapid expansion there’s a need now to persuade anybody in this market exceptionally high potential. Suffice to say that, as authors put it: “there is 2.5 billion people that do not have a decent access to the banking system … “ and “There is no access to true global lending market …” . Hence, “a” for “Volume”.
As to “Singularity” (uniqueness) I can’t be so generous despite the fact that ETHLend is today one the biggest fishes in this still small and muddy pond. Additionally, authors tried to add some original features (for example, “Gamified Credit Profile”, which incentives borrowers to not overdue their debts) to the functionality, which has already became almost standard to this industry, like “Prediction Market”, “Sharing the Risk” or AI. However, I have to degrade them to “b-”. After all, p2p lending remains one of the most popular among fledgling entrepreneurs brunches of FinTech (crypto or not) and competition there is growing exponentially.
“Empathy”, which intends to measure the level of users emotional involvement with a platform, is slightly higher than we can expect from such ancient, exploitative business as usury (well, not exactly illegal, of course) thanks to ETHLend’s higher than average name recognition, a general “coolness” of crypto industry and non-touched-yet by big scandals reputation. Result: c+.
Now to “TimeLine”, or the exposure of platform’s short / medium / long terms strategy, which I found to be completely absent in this paper. Might be I had to be looking somewhere else (please, let me know where). Result: “c”.
RESULT: “Vision”: Singularity- Volume-Empathy-Timeline: b-ac+c